Helena Rubinstein used guile, brilliant branding, and more than a few falsehoods to lift cosmetics from an accessory for prostitutes to a desired luxury item. Geoffrey Jones reveals her history.
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Large companies can be easy targets for disruption, but Gary Pisano says there are steps that can keep them ahead of the innovation curve. Rule 1: Don't emulate startup cultures.
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One well-known feature of marketplace platforms like Airbnb and eBay is their scalability. This paper identifies the strategic trade-off and implications for scalability when a platform provides services to existing and potential sellers that help reduce their fixed costs of running the business. Timing this investment is an important consideration for maximizing marketplace scalability.

After thirty years of research and development, HondaJet is finally in the air and winning its market. Gary Pisano discusses how Honda moved from cars and lawn mowers to multimillion-dollar private aircraft.
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Pal's Sudden Service hamburger chain has a remarkable operating model and organizational culture unique in the fast food industry. Can Pal's maintain its high quality and happy employees if it expands? Gary Pisano discusses the company’s strategic challenge.
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The food industry is under intense study at Harvard Business School. This story sampler looks at issues including restaurant marketing, chefs as CEOs, and the business of food science.
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by David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon H. Hanson, Pian Shu and Gary Pisano

US firms in industries exposed to greater change in import competition from China have suffered worse growth in patenting and R&D spending than firms in industries exposed to less change in Chinese competition.

This paper explore how firms’ choices about capability investments shape competitive outcomes. In essence, while general-purpose management capabilities rooted in such activities as quality management systems and corporate governance may contribute to performance differences across firms, firms also need to develop market-specific capabilities to compete. It is also crucial to manage two types of uncertainty: supply side uncertainty to create new capabilities and demand side uncertainty about the value of those capabilities.

In today's global markets, companies have many choices to procure what they need to develop, build, and sell product. So who needs a manufacturing cluster, such as Detroit? Research by Gary Pisano and Giulio Buciuni shows that in some industries, location still matters.
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When and why do manufacturing clusters survive globalization? According to case studies and analysis contained in this paper, 1) cluster decline is not an inevitable consequence of globalization, yet 2) once an industrial commons has eroded and a supply chain has disaggregated, it is very difficult to rebuild. Among the managerial implications of this research, managers needing to make long-term commitments toward supply chain configurations can be helped by understanding how location matters to manufacturing performance.
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Knowledge plays an important role in the productivity and prosperity of economies, organizations, and individuals. Even so, research on learning has primarily focused on the role of doing (experience) in fostering progress over time. To compare the effectiveness of different sources of learning, the authors take a micro approach and study learning at the individual level. They argue that learning from direct experience can be more effective if coupled with reflection—that is, the intentional attempt to synthesize, abstract, and articulate the key lessons taught by experience. Using a mixed-method approach that combines laboratory experiments and a field study in a large business process outsourcing company in India, they find support for this prediction. Further, they find that the effect of reflection on learning is mediated by greater perceived ability to achieve a goal (i.e., self-efficacy). Together, these results reveal reflection to be a powerful mechanism behind learning, confirming the words of American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer John Dewey: "We do not learn from experience ... we learn from reflecting on experience." Key concepts include: Learning from direct experience can be more effective if coupled with reflection-that is, the intentional attempt to synthesize, abstract, and articulate the key lessons taught by experience. Reflecting on what has been learned makes experience more productive. Reflection builds one's confidence in the ability to achieve a goal (i.e., self-efficacy), which in turn translates into higher rates of learning.
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Under the leadership of Chef Davide Oldani, the Italian restaurant D'O balances Michelin-star-level quality with affordable prices. In the following story and video, Professor Gary Pisano explains how Oldani does it.
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In their new book, Producing Prosperity: Why America Needs a Manufacturing Renaissance, Harvard Business School professors Gary P. Pisano and Willy C. Shih discuss the dangers of underinvesting in the nation's manufacturing capabilities. This excerpt discusses the importance of the "industrial commons."
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Summing Up: Does the US have the political will or educational ability to remake its manufacturing sector on the back of an 'industrial commons?' Professor Jim Heskett's readers are dubious.
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This note by Gary P. Pisano provides a framework for designing an R&D strategy. It starts with the simple notion that a strategy is a system approach to solving a problem. An R&D strategy is defined a coherent set of interrelated choices across decision concerning: organizational architecture, processes, people, and project portfolios. To illustrate the framework, we use examples of three pharmaceutical companies and examine how their different R&D strategies were rooted in different assumptions about the core driver of R&D performance. This suggests that the very first question to be answered in strategy development is: What's our shared understanding of the root cause of the problem we are trying to solve? Key concepts include: A good strategy provides consistency, coherence, and alignment. The "game plan" for an R&D organization can be broken down into 4 strategic levers: architecture, processes, people, and portfolio. Together, decisions made in each of these categories constitute the R&D strategy. R&D performance results from the interaction of many different decisions and choices, including the size and location of R&D facilities, the division of labor between various groups, the choice of technologies used inside the R&D organization, the selection of personnel, the allocation of resources, the design of processes for managing projects, and other factors.
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After decades of outsourcing, America's ability to innovate and create high-tech products essential for future prosperity is on the decline, argue professors Gary Pisano and Willy Shih. Is it too late to get it back? From HBS Alumni Bulletin.
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